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Sunday, November 15, 2015

`The Sun Would Have Gone Out'

Prophets
are always to be distrusted, often rightly, even when their prophecies prove
accurate. In their own time, prophets and crackpots are indistinguishable. Both
are obsessive, sometimes Ahab-like monomaniacs, and generally less than polite,
well-groomed and telegenic. It’s their message that matters to them, not the
niceties of delivery. In a letter to William F. Buckley dated Oct. 8, 1956 (Odyssey of a Friend:Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F.
Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961, 1969), Chambers writes:

“The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that
a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of
what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our
minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the
great sins, perhaps the great sin, is
to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more
important than this wound.”

No one wishes to be reminded of his vulnerability. Being good,
honest and hard-working, let alone selfish and hedonistic, are no guarantee of protection.
The late Robert Conquest, poet and historian, the great Jeremiah of Communism
and its evils, writes in Reflections on a
Ravaged Century (2001):

“The revolutionary believed it to be in the nature of things
that dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served,
just as the Aztec priests believed themselves to be entirely justified in
ripping the hearts out of thousands of victims, since had they not done so, the
sun would have gone out, a far worse catastrophe for mankind. In either case,
the means are acceptable, being inevitable. . .”